Although Facebook's technology is able to proactively make suggestions based on the context of your chat, it doesn't actually store any of the data from your conversation. If so, a button will pop up to automatically suggest a sticker or help with those other actions.

If the subject of travel comes up, M might suggest an option to share one's location during a conversation.

Facebook has been testing M with a "small percentage of users for the past few months", but starting 6 April, it is expanding the assistant to all Messenger users in the US. If the AI failed to order flowers or book a restaurant, a human would take over, and the machine would theoretically learn how to do the task from their actions. "This version of M will help you in your conversation with your friends".

Facebook on Thursday launched its digital assistant named "M" for US users of its Messenger application, ramping up the social network's efforts in artificial intelligence.

"We wanted to start trying to be super-helpful where [users] are, in their day-to-day conversations", Landowski told Quartz.

How does Facebook M work?

There's a decent list (viewable below) of operations you can expect to see immediately that M is capable of performing as of today. If they say "Where are you?"

Following in the footsteps of Apple Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, Samsung Bixby, Facebook has launched M. It is described as a "helpful assistant in Messenger, powered by artificial intelligence".

When I spoke to Alex Lebrun, founder of Wit.ai, for Popular Science in 2015 shortly after his company was acquired by Facebook, he said the whole point of M was to provide a digital virtual assistant that could handle atypical requests, and not be relegated to the simplest use-case. If it's stumped, it falls back to a team of human staffers who try to help, and then teach M to do the job by itself next time. But if you don't like M at all, you can mute it in settings. "The original M was a testbed for a lot of things and will continue to be a testbed", Chudnovsky said. To start, only six actions are supported, but Facebook has expectations for M to do more and be further extended. "We want to do everything".